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This year's California Rare Book School course was on the history of typography, taught by Paul Shaw, designer and design historian, with Grendl Löfkvist, printer and Education Director at the Letterform Archive.

Pedigree of a Vandercook Press: Below are some photos of how my new Vandercook Universal III was carefully crated and shipped from the fine arts press of Stephen F. Austin State University. It arrives this Friday.

For this project, I wanted to see if I could make a solid color book cover, then cut out portions of it, and inlay a different color book cloth. Then I wanted to see if I could create a drawing or design on the lighter colored cloth.

This is a video of the book studio progress from the first of December 2019. There is a full basement underneath with stairs in the back and a wide open space for lifting heavy equipment down into the basement.

I read somewhere that a bookbinder has to make at least 100 books before they can claim to have the necessary skills to do quality work. Each of the 100 books is intended to provide one or more lessons in what not to do.

Over the course of 2018, I read books about mastery. Every book hammered home the same point: You cannot master anything that you don't feel passionate about.
Learning a profession, any profession, requires hours of commitment to learning, failing, practice, and mentorship. 10,000 hours is the number the experts say is required to "master" a skill. But according to my study, the hours alone are not enough.